


Llámalo Por Su Nombre

by lisachan



Category: Elite (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:20:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26542807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisachan/pseuds/lisachan
Summary: Valerio always loved his sister. Valerio always wanted to destroy his sister. Lucrecia always loved her brother. Lucrecia always wanted to devour her brother.This is the story of their obsession.
Relationships: Lucrecia "Lu" Montesinos Hendrich/Guzmán Nunier Osuna, Lucrecia "Lu" Montesinos Hendrich/Valerio Montesinos Hendrich
Comments: 2
Kudos: 31





	Llámalo Por Su Nombre

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Llámalo Por Su Nombre](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26529712) by [lisachan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisachan/pseuds/lisachan). 



Lucrecia falls beside him, featherweight. The mattress barely swings underneath her weight, if he let himself be distracted a second, if he allowed himself, just for an instant, not to believe Lucrecia to be the star around which Valerio revolves in gravitational confusion, he wouldn’t even notice the shift. 

The orange sunset light filters through the barely opened curtains on the huge windows covering a whole wall of his room. The light turns redder by the second, second after second the bed drowns and becomes a bloody nest. Valerio closes his eyes and lets himself drown too, in Lucrecia’s heavy breaths, in the accelerated beats of her heart – a sound Valerio can only imagine since she got off him – and then in her small chuckling.

Lucrecia always laughs after fucking. There’s a bell within her, ringing when their bodies disconnect. Valerio hates the sound of that laughter, it’s the sound of the alarm that inevitably follows their separation. Valerio loves the sound of that laughter, it’s the only clue he can get that allows him to grasp the hidden happiness Lucrecia would die before showing him.

His sister turns to her side. Valerio turns to look at her because he’s been staring at the ceiling for much too long already, and he misses her shapes. Her perfectly rounded breasts resting one of top of the other, pressed down by her arm. Her flat stomach, her navel, the sweetest valley to explore with his tongue. Valerio holds his breath for a minute, clenches his fists, tries not to think about it.

Lu comes closer again. This is a game to her. She’s sixteen and her body’s been on fire for two years already. Valerio turned that fire on, and she keeps blooming and then burning only to bloom again, like the woods. Thankful for the pain he inflicts, only because she can’t really feel it yet.

“What do you like the most about me?” she asks.

Such a question, in such a moment, Valerio could only expect coming from such a person as her. Narcissism personified.

“Your cruelty,” he answers, reaching out to stroke her chin with his index finger, “I already know one day you’re going to break my heart.”

“And you think that’s a good thing?”

“Of course. If I want it to happen.”

Lucrecia snorts, frowning lightly. “ _Please_ ,” she mutters, “Why would you want it to happen?”

He doesn’t tell her that having his own heart broken by her and then wait for the wound to heal leaving behind a white scar is the only way he has to carry a trace of her love forever. He doesn’t tell her that he wants it to happen because it would only be fair, because somehow he knows that, even though she kissed him first, he wanted her to kiss him from before. He let her kiss him first because he was a coward, and sooner or later he will pay in blood for that cowardice. He will pay when Lucrecia falls for someone else and spreads her wings to fly away from this red nest, and his heart, away from hers, will keep beating for an instant, and then will wither. Reduced to a dry, useless stump, it will fall by itself. Valerio-without-a-heart will be Valerio as he deserves to be. Alone, empty, numb. He will walk through his life without caring much about it. He will drown in whatever can make him feel sparks again for a second. Drugs. Alcohol. Women’s thighs. Men’s thighs. Whatever hole’s available for a quick fuck. He will shine for but a second and then he will become an eclipse of his own pain for the rest of his existence.

Valerio-without-a-heart, Valerio-without-Lucrecia, Valerio-without-anything. He comes from that place. He deserves to go back to that place.

“I’m mad, you know that,” he tells her. He moves on top of her and Lucrecia blooms like a flower for him, she spreads her legs, welcomes him on her body, wraps her arms around his shoulders and her legs around his waist, keeping him close. He keeps looking at her as he starts moving slowly, searching for her wet sex against his own, already hard again. “I want your all. Give me your worst.”

“Why don’t you ask me for my best?”

Valerio smiles against her lips, biting them gently. Then, he exhales shakily as he feels the tip of his cock barely enter her. “I got your best already, didn’t I?” he says.

He doesn’t know if he said it on purpose. He probably did. Lucrecia pushes him away, tells him to go fuck himself, grabs one of his shoes from the floor and throws it at him. “Asshole,” she says, marching out of his bedroom, still completely naked.

Valerio breathes in and out as his body turns off. He lies down in the middle of the bed, spreads his legs to take as much space as possible and crosses his arms behind his head. He finds himself staring at the ceiling, again.

He’s way worse than an asshole, he knows that. But it’s okay if Lu only stops there with her judgement.

*

When they’re together, Valerio isn’t a human being anymore. He’s not even a mortal creature – all the fears, doubts, insecurities pertaining to creature who are still able to suffer, to be scared for their own life and health, slither out of his body and disperse like water trickling down the side of the road and disappearing into sewers after it rained. Fear doesn’t exist anymore. Shame doesn’t exist anymore. Only Lucrecia. Only she exists.

Lucrecia starts a fire in his stomach. She smiles and the world becomes a place inhabited by monsters hiding in the shadows, under the bed, behind the doors, down the drain in the sink, and all those monsters whisper the same thing – take her, take her, take her, she’s yours, she’s there for you, she’s been created so that you could drive through and through her with the closest thing to a sword your naked body possesses. Take her, then, she won’t say no, she’ll smile as she welcomes you inside, she’ll hold you close and you’ll hear her sigh, and that’s what you want, right?, live by only breathing those tiny little gasps dancing on her lips while you fuck her making the bed creak. Take her and you can do that. Take her and you’ll be happy.

Honestly, though, there’s nothing that makes him more unhappy than fucking with his sister. She always ends up walking away in a rage, he always ends up regretting every single moment since when he touched her for the first time. Part of it is guilt – he imagines his sense of guilt as a little mouse, he can almost feel it gnawing at the corners of his soul – but it isn’t just that. It is a dissatisfaction much deeper than what Lucrecia could ever be able to fill in. The sense of frustration devouring him every time he realizes that it doesn’t matter how hard he holds her in the bed, how many marks he leaves on her body, how many times he can come inside her, she will never be completely his.

Sometimes he allows himself to whisper her name in a soft voice in the darkness, just to taste it. To help his lips memorize its rhythm, the syllable composition. He repeats it like a prayer to fix it in his muscular memory. So that even if he died his body would remember the conditioned reflex of his love. This is, he thinks, the only piece of her that will be forever his. Her name uttered in a whisper in the darkness of the night.

*

He wakes up with an addled mind and the first thing he sees is Lucrecia riding him, her eyes closed, her arms extended backwards, her hands on his knees, biting down at her bottom lip to try and contain her moans. She’s a miracle, a vision, and Valerio believes he’s still dreaming, for a second. Then he remembers he never dreams about her. And in an automatic reflex he raises both hands and places them on her hips, feeling their full, sweet curve underneath his fingertips.

She sighs and a small, nasal, pitchy sound slithers through her lips together with that sound, accompanies by a shiver that shakes her from the tips of her toes to the roots of her hair. She’s come, and Valerio struggles to swallow, and then tries to concentrate on horrible things not to come too.

“Lu,” he whispers, enraptured like a hermit facing a vision of his god, “Lu, what are you doing?”

“I just wanted you so much,” her voice is a growl, feral, deep. When she leans forward, her hair cascades on Valerio, chocolate and honey. Valerio drowns. He keeps drowning. He can do nothing but drown in this relationship. “I couldn’t hold back.”

“You must never do that,” he grabs her by those silky her, he drags her down, down, further down, he kisses her as though he wanted to steal her soul through her throat, “Not with me.”

“But I have to,” Lucrecia moves closer to him, presses her breasts against his chest as she keep swinging her hips – she’s so close Valerio’s cock is barely ever coming out of her, it just sinks deeper and deeper into her, and Lucrecia’s the center of the Earth, the beating core of this planet, and Valerio throws himself into the erupting volcano of his desire for her, and lets himself burn and drown in an ocean of lava, “If I stopped holding back I’d have to tear your chest open and take your heart. And eat it.”

Valerio shivers, closes his eyes and tries not to think this is the sexiest thing he’s ever been told. But then he chooses to accept that it is, he lets himself go to this cannibal love and he bites her hard on her neck, shoulder and chin. “What would you need my heart in your stomach for, baby sister?”

“It’d be another piece of you to keep inside me,” she answers in a disarmingly nonchalant whisper.

He doesn’t know who’s more selfish between them – if it’s him, who believes her to be already his own, or her, who wants nothing more than to steal him to himself.

*

The way her voice sounds hideous and then adorable immediately after when she curses  
.  
The curve of her stomach when she’s had too much to eat and she collapses on the couch murmuring _ay!, Dios mío_.

Some smiles she gives him when he’s been unbearable all afternoon.

The taste of her come on his tongue.

The secrets she tells him every now and then, fewer and fewer with every candle she adds on her birthday cake, year after year.

The skirt of that damn school uniform, that drives him mad.

How she insists on walking on high heels even when her feet hurt.

Her headbands, looking more like princess tiaras with every day that goes by.

The way the mattress gives in to welcome her when she silently slips in his bed at night.

The warmth of her skin, her slightly sweaty palm when she sticks a hand down his pants to jerk him off.

The intensity with which she frowns while she’s doing her homework – so much there’s always a line line between her eyebrows for hours after she’s stopped studying.

Some horribly mean things she can say when she gets angry to the point of forgetting who’s standing before her.

How furiously she rides him when she’s so horny she can’t hold back even when their parents are home.

That one time they rode a taxi back home together after an endless night in Teatro Barceló, when she, maddened with desire, sat on top of him and rubbed herself against him the whole time.

That one time he walked in her room hard as a rock, but he found her in tears for something ridiculously stupid and suddenly he wanted nothing more than to hug her until she stopped crying.

The first time they kissed.

The first time they fucked.

The first time he told her he loved her.

The only time she told him.

Lucrecia walks into his room, shrouded in pale moonlight, and looks at him with cat eyes that drive him mad, and every fucking night she does it Valerio plays movies in his head remembering every single moment in which he loved her more than he loved himself, and for a moment he wonders if it’s worth it.

Then she slips next to him and curls by his side. Her scent turns into oxygen, her warmth melts into water, and, as always, Valerio drowns.

Of course it’s worth it. He would die a thousand deaths, each one more terrible than the one before, he would do it for her. And it would always be worth it.

*

Today, the borderless dictatorship of his desire suffocates him. It always happens when Lucrecia gets angry about something he said or did and, to punish him for the capital offense, chooses to stop talking to him.

They’re together at Teatro Barceló, but they could be hundreds of yards away. Valerio throws himself in the chaotic ocean of the dance floor, swimming as far away as he can from his sister. He drinks something. Snorts something else. Snorts something more off the perfectly white and rounded shoulder of a nameless blondie the laughter of which sounds like a siren’s song.

He lets himself go to the ephemeral pleasure of contacts that don’t leave marks on his skin, unintelligible sounds, an attraction as volatile as gasoline, with the same intense scent, the same ability to make him dizzy, his head spinning, but that will also leave no trace comes tomorrow morning.

Some nights it’s easier like this. Some nights Valerio wants it to be easy.

And while he gets lost into his easy night, on the other side of the club Lucrecia kisses Guzmán for the first time.

*

She doesn’t introduce them right away, naturally. She does everything in her power, actually, to make sure Valerio doesn’t find out. Of course Valerio notices there’s something different about her, he feels it, he sees it, he knows by the fact that she stops slipping in his bedroom at night, by the way she moves away with a vague smile when he comes closer to her. He knows by the kisses she denies him, by the way she tears herself off him, with a pain that he feels and that carries the echo of her own, whenever he somehow manages to trap her between his body and a random wall to steal from her a kiss without which he’d die of asphyxiation. There’s something different but Valerio doesn’t know what it is. He blames their last fight, Lucrecia’s always weird for a while after they fight. She runs away from him, then comes back only to run away again, she plays tug of war with his heart, her slender fingers on one end of the rope, the dark cave of his chest on the other end. Within it, the burning pain of the beating muscle his ribcage is trying to protect.

The days turn into weeks, he’s hungry for her, he can feel she’s hungry too, so much her love has started to feed off itself, but still she refuses to come back to him. She keeps running away, she flies like a fairy in the woods, hiding behind thick trunks, and so he grabs her by her wrist and squeezes it until he feels her wince in pain. “If you don’t tell me what’s the fucking matter I swear to God I’ll fucking kill you,” he growls like a blood-thirsty beast.

She smiles through her pain, through the creaking sound of her wrist bones, she smiles defiantly at him and says “I’ve got a boyfriend, now. His name’s Guzmán.”

Valerio thinks about it. The name doesn’t sound new to him. Guzmán. Guzmán. He goes to school with them, he’s in Lucrecia’s class. Valerio’s one year ahead of her and doesn’t know him at all.

“What the fuck are you talking about,” he roars, clashing her against the wall, “Who the fuck is he?”

“I’ll introduce you if you want.”

“Sure. So I can snap his neck broken.”

“You won’t touch him with a finger.”

“Yeah, where’s the army you will stop me with?”

“Valerio, _listen_ to me,” her voice is poison, her eyes ice picks stabbing him in his skull, “We’ve fucked around enough, you and I. That’s enough.”

“What are you saying, what are you even _talking_ about?!”

“Us. And this bullshit between us that’s been going on for years.”

“Yeah, and who started it?!”

“I don’t fucking care who started it, don’t you get it?!” she puts her hands against his shoulders, her long nails scratching him, “Won’t you look at yourself, how you behave? I start dating someone else and you turn into a fucking animal! You pushed me into walls, you yell you wanna kill him, are you even listening to yourself? Are you?”

“Lucrecia, I will kill him first and then I’ll fucking kill you too. And in the end I’ll fucking shoot myself in the brains too, problem solved.”

Lucrecia breathes in and then out, looking at him as though he was an idiotic child. Valerio knew this would happen. When he told her he loved her cruelty he was thinking about something like this, a moment just like this. It was a premonition of this unbearable fucking pain. He can feel the wound, he can feel it tearing itself up inside him. There it is, finally. The only trace of her he will never be rid of. Whatever happens, should she even marry this asshole, should she then break up with him and come back crawling to him, begging for his forgiveness, begging him to take her back, the scar left by this wound will never heal.

A part of him is masochistically satisfied with it.

“This thing’s keeping us trapped,” Lucrecia says.

“I love you,” is his answer, “And you love me.”

“This isn’t love, Valerio. Call it by its name.”

“I don’t know any other name for it.”

Lucrecia hesitates for a second. She looks at him as though she didn’t know what to do of him. Valerio’s happy about it. If she doesn’t, she will at least have to stay a few minutes longer while she figures it out.

“Starting now it’s over between us,” she says, “We’ll go back to be just brother and sister.”

Valerio lets her go. He walks back and away from her as though she was made of fire. (She is.)

He fails all his classes at the end of the year. He has to repeat them, and now he’s the same year they are.

By that time, Guzmán and Lucrecia have been together for seven months.

*

Guzmán is, obviously, incredibly handsome.

He’s got the typical charm of all assholes, a smile against which it is impossible to fight, a kind of self-confidence that forces you to admire him. And Valerio admires him. He admires him from a distance, and he hates him from a distance. For as much as he knows, Guzmán happily hates him back. Lucrecia and him share a nameless relationship, as Guzmán refuses to identify it, but still they are introduced to each other’s parents, they become part of each other’s families, they are paraded as the golden couple they actually are through each other’s summer houses.

Lucrecia dresses like a good girl, smiles like a good girl, puts her make up on like a good girl, stays by Guzmán’s side like a good girl. Her hidden nature tries to break out from underneath the prison of her skin clawing its way out, but Lucrecia learns how to tame it, how to contain it. She rarely lets it out, only when Guzmán wants to play. In the shower. In the pool. Valerio follows them everywhere. Valerio sees them everywhere. When he’s in enough pain, it’s them who follow him. In his nightmares.

When he feels inclined towards self-harm enough, Valerio lists all of Guzmán’s qualities. His beauty, his smile, his confidence. His money, also, the bright future waiting for him. His perfect family, perfect life, perfect votes. The list of his qualities appears to be endless, but the only real quality that determined Lucrecia’s presence by his side is that Guzmán is not him. With him, Lucrecia can have the life she feels she deserves. Simple, bright, a nice stroll down a road paved with richness and success. Valerio suspects his sisters sees her relationship with Guzmán as some sort of extraordinary thing. The sad truth is that it actually is the most mundane thing that ever happened to her.

This is what hurts Valerio first and foremost. He was the extraordinary in Lucrecia’s life. And she left him for the most trivial thing in the entire world.

*

That’s not even true, that’s not the thing that hurts him first and foremost. He’s in pain because he wants her. He’s in pain because he feels her as though he owned her, and not having her destroys him. He’s in pain because he misses her, he misses her like he’d miss blood in his veins if he were drained of it, he misses her like he’d miss a limb if he got it amputated.

He’s in pain because he loves her like one would love the abyss just before falling into it. With religious fear, with devotion. With the desire of letting himself disappear into it.

He’s in pain because he loves her like one loves the idea of pain before it truly starts hurting.

No, he’s in pain because he loves her, period. That’s all there is to it. And admitting it does nothing but make the pain deeper.

*

The first time Lucrecia and Guzmán fight, Valerio almost faints in excitement. His head’s in a bubble because he doesn’t even remember what he swallowed last night and how much of it, but he hears everything about that, every single furious moment. The front door being slammed open so hard it bangs against the wall, Lucrecia’s voice, so acute and broken, as she screams _you asshole, you son of a bitch_ , the door closing with another bang, her quick steps – heels on marble – as she runs up the stairs. Another door opening, another door closing.

Then, the sound of her tears. Lucrecia cries like one who never learned how to do it. Drowned in a tense silence, only every now and then broken by hiccups tearing her chest apart and then transforming into shaky breaths, heavy with rage, like sometimes clouds seem, charged with electricity up in the sky.

Valerio rises from his bed, where he’s been, staring at the ceiling, since he woke up. He drags himself out of his bedroom, walks through the hallway, walks into Lucrecia’s bedroom without asking for permission first. He finds her standing in front of the window, no doubt staring at the very spot on the street where Guzmán was up to a second ago.

He comes closer in perfect silence. He can sense her vibrate. She’s a tiny bomb ready to blow. Tic toc tic toc echoes in his brain. Blow up, Lucrecia. Let’s burn together.

She turns towards him as though she heard his calling. Her eyes are liquid and heavy with hate. No one in the world feels quite like his sister does. She only exists in the realm of everything, or in the realm of nothing. Guzmán was everything up to a minute ago. Now he’s a void, the empty space between one second and the one that follows it.

Valerio doesn’t know why, but he falls on his knees before his sister, arms held up, like facing the apparition of a goddess. He puts his hands on her hips and Lucrecia puts her hands on his shoulders. She comes closer, she leans on him, covers his lips with her own. She kisses him in a bite, sucking at his tongue, pulling him on herself, diving into him as she mercilessly conquers his body back.

“Don’t speak,” she says.

Valerio keeps quiet. He lies down on the floor while his sister straddles him and lets his cock slide between her thighs. He concentrates on the very spot where her small hands rest on his stomach, the contrast between his own tanned skin and his sister’s paler one.

He comes inside her. Prays for a million horrible things, then takes them all back.

The next day, Lucrecia comes back to him. She comes back as though obsessed by him. She takes him in without foreplay, without preparation, “don’t speak,” she repeats, and Valerio keeps complying, and keeps coming inside her.

They fuck like that for weeks. They pretend not to even be thinking about it, simulating a mindlessness that was never theirs to begin with.

When Lucrecia tells him her period didn’t come, once again Valerio pretends. He pretends a surprise that he uses a shield to protect himself from the fear he can’t pretend not to be feeling.

Lucrecia looks at him in his eyes and says “What are we going to do now?”

Valerio tries to swallow. He doesn’t manage.

He also tries to hug her. He doesn’t manage that either.

*

As always, she’s the one doing the first step. She comes back to him a few days later, her eyes bearing a new kind of hardness, a deeper kind of cruelty. Pain sharpened her and honed her. Lucrezia’s a stalactite, now. “We have to talk,” she says. He struggles to swallow. Nods silently because he doesn’t know what to tell her. He’s never at a loss of words, never at a loss of breath, unless she’s around, turning his brain off and stealing his breath off his lungs. “I won’t ask you what you wanna do. It’s not your decision. It’s my body, my life. You don’t have a say in this.”

“Lu, I don’t wanna have any say in this,” he tells her. It stuns him, the mere idea she could think he could somehow want to put himself between herself and her choice. “I expect you to be the one in charge of this.”

“Useless until the end,” she hisses back.

Valerio frowns. “What do you mean?”

“ _I mean_ ,” she says in a mocking tone, “That, as always, you will leave all the burden on my shoulders. You won’t even try to pretend you’ve got any guts.”

“Lu, have you gone mad?” he widens his arms by the sides of his body, a gesture that is at the same time irritation and resignation, “You _just_ told me I don’t have any say in this, and you get angry because I don’t want to?”

“ _Precisely_ ,” Lu crosses her arms on her chest. Her breasts are less rounded than they used to. She must’ve lost some weight in the last few days. It is barely even noticeable – no one else beside him would notice. “You were never brave enough to do anything, Valerio. You always looked at me as though you want to eat me alive, but I was the one who had to take the first bite. You played the martyr because our relationship had no future, but I had to be the one to break up with you. You were freaking out because you couldn’t have me anymore, mad with jealousy about Guzmán, but I had to be the one who came back to you. You put this monster inside me,” she growls, pressing a hand hard on her own stomach, “But when I asked you for help you couldn’t even touch me.”

“You knew perfectly well…” he struggles to speak, his throat encumbered by the guilt that the crude truth of her words is spilling into him, “You knew perfectly well what you were doing when you were riding me like that, Lu. You couldn’t not know I wasn’t using any condom. Once, maybe, but not all those times.”

“So what?”

“So I thought that was what you wanted.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault. It’s my fault I’m pregnant.”

“Lu, that’s not what I said.”

“Then what did you say exactly?”

“Fuck, I don’t know!” Valerio raises his voice, for the first time in forever with her. This is Lucrecia in her purest form, a savage beast feasting on hate, rage, regret. She wants everything and everything still isn’t enough to satisfy her, to be perfect Valerio should be at the same time prisoner and warden, victim and torturer, immanent and transcendent, he’d have to love her and hate her at the same time, make her feel good and horribly bad, he’d have to be enormous, infinite like the universe, and then turn his tiniest and disappear whenever she needs, whenever she doesn’t want to see him anymore.

This is Lucrecia in her purest form. A savage beast. Valerio always knew she’d feast on him, sooner or later, so why isn’t he just resigning to the idea?

“I don’t understand what you want from me,” he says, his voice low, his eyes low, his heard delving deep into his stomach, “I don’t know what to do to make you happy. I tried—”

“How?”

The question comes unexpected. He turns back towards her and for a second he only wants to run away, because her eyes have a weight.

“I’m sorry?”

“I want you to tell me how, Valerio. How you tried to make me happy. I’m curious, I want to understand what it is you tell yourself to pretend that our relationship is like any other relationship between two people who are trying to make each other happy.”

“…if we aren’t trying to make each other happy, then what are we doing?”

“I know what we’re doing,” now it’s her time to lower her eyes. She holds onto the hem of her t-shirt and crushes it in her fists, nervously. A performance she would never show to anyone else. “And you know it too. It’s just that you don’t want to admit it. This is why you refuse to call this shit by its name. You call it love, you’ve got your mouth full with this shitty love. This isn’t love, okay? It isn’t.”

“But I love you,” he answers in a shallow breath. He repeats the lesson he’s learned by heart years ago, a notion that he knows to be certain, to be true. For the first time, though, he wonders about the meaning of this notion. He always knew he loved Lucrecia, that was never in doubt – it isn’t now, it probably will never be. But what should they be supposed to do with this love, that he doesn’t know. What’s the point of it, beside hurting each other? That’s an unsolved mystery.

“You don’t love me,” Lucrecia says, refusing to look at him, “And I don’t love you. Tell me what this is, Valerio. Tell me, or I will.”

“This is love. I love you.”

“It’s an obsession,” she finally says, her voice breaking into so many pieces it is impossible to count them, her words slipping through her lips like broken glass shards, “It’s cruelty, it’s a sickness. We will keep hurting each other until we destroy each other.”

“I always accepted that,” he replies. He would like not to feel so sick while he says it. “I always told you. I wasn’t lying when I asked you to give me your worst.”

She looks up at him. Her eyes are huge and heavy with tears. There’s a universe of pain inside them – too much to face, even for two people.

“Why didn’t you ever ask me for my best, Valerio?” he tries to answer but she precedes him. “Wait, I’ll tell you: you always knew I could’ve never given it to you.”

A new tension overcomes him, the same feeling of impending doom people must feel when they’re abroad a burning plane, knowing they’re plummeting down towards their end.

“Why couldn’t you?” he asks her.

She offers him a smile that is at the same time mocking and apologizing. “Because I never wanted,” she answers.

It is the end of the world. It ends with a blow, fire and flames, just like Valerio always knew it would.

They always were each other’s North Star. It makes sense their love would end in a supernova.

*

Sitting next to his sister in the clinic’s waiting room, Valerio thinks life is a cruel novelist with no sense of narrative rhythm. Embarrassingly untimely. After what they shared with each other last night, every novel, even the most childish and immature, would’ve ended with a goodbye. _And they never met again. Those were the last words they spoke to one another before parting ways forever. That was the last time he had a chance to look at her face, see his own reflection in her eyes. It was the last time he allowed his own personal inner orchestra to play the melody of feelings only her voice could elicit from him._

It’s the best part of fiction, in his opinion. The way it turns all endings in closures. While in reality all endings are doors left slightly ajar, giving way to trails that often keep passing through them for days, weeks, months.

Their most cumbersome trail is passing through the last door today, in this clinic. It will slide out of Lucrecia and out of their life. But Valerio would be lying to himself if he believed even for a second that that would be enough to put an ending to their story once and forever. Once out of this place, they’ll go back home together. They’ll still sleep in rooms next to one another, they will keep sharing their food, their school days.

He deluded himself into believing blowing up would at least put an end to pain. He realizes now what really happens when love ends in a situation such as theirs – the real reason why siblings shouldn’t be allowed to ever be together.

You can break up. But to end all you should bleed yourself dry.

And none of them wants to.

*

Lucrecia takes four days to herself to heal. She tells dad and her mother she doesn’t feel quite well, blames her period, stays home, hidden underneath the blankets, beyond a locked door. Valerio doesn’t even try to enter that room. The trail tugs at him but her ignores it.

When his sister emerges from her self-imposed seclusion, she’s beautiful and healthy as though she never went through anything. Perfect make up, perfect hair, her uniform fits her so well it seems painted on her body. She smiles. She greets her mom with a kiss on her cheek and dad with a warm, bright smile.

Valerio gathers his courage and asks her how she feels. Lucrecia answers him that she’s perfectly fine with the same affected voice she’s use with anyone else.

They drive to school together that day. Standing on top of the stairs going down to the hallway, Valerio watches her as she joins Guzmán and his friends. He treats her with arrogance, mocks her, but when she answers back smugly his whole face brightens up in a way Valerio detests. Guzmán holds one of her hands, brings it up to his lips and leaves a light kiss on her knuckles. Lucrecia blushes and smiles like Valerio imagines the sun would smile.

That very same night, he goes to Teatro Barceló. He maxes out his father’s credit card buying alcoholic drinks that he swallows down until he feels like he’s gonna throw up and then some more. Fucks a girl he can’t see the face of in the girl’s restroom. Then he walks out, loads a completely drunk stranger boy on his dad’s Jaguar as he drives the car 80 miles an hour down the road back home. When he comes, he shoves his dick so deep in the poor fucker’s throat he pukes and then faints. Valerio doesn’t manage to do anything but bursts into a mad laughter. He slaps the boy a couple times on his nape and he comes back to himself and starts laughing like a madman too. Covered in vomit and sperm they drag themselves out the car and into the house, they collapse on the first available couch. There they’re found by dad and Lucrecia when they wake up the morning after.

When, after a few hours, his father comes to him with a fight ticket straight to Mexico City, Lucrecia cries in anger, but Valerio’s smiling.

*

Valerio tugs at the trail, but the bastard won’t give. It’s stuck underneath his sister’s locked door, and it keeps it half open.

One year later, Valerio follows it back home.

Lucrecia looks at him in complete disbelief for a second. So many emotions dancing behind her eyes, so many Valerio struggles to identify them all and doesn’t even try listing them. Once she settles down, though, Valerio sees her shake with joy. It’s a vibration hidden underneath all the others, it includes all others, it overcomes them. The telluric movement that brings them one against the other.

“What are you doing here?” she asks once they’re alone.

He could answer her in a thousand different ways. He could tell her he wanted to see her – it’d be the truth. He could tell her his mother kicked him out after the last bullshit he pulled – that’d be true too.

He walks up to her, instead. Gets closer to her, stares into her eyes. He speaks less than one inch off her lips. “I’m back to destroy you,” he tells her.

He has no doubts she’ll understand. And the corner of her lips tilting upwards in a smile as sharp as a vampire’s canines is confirmation enough.

The thing that binds them together – be it love or anything else, it doesn’t matter – doesn’t need a name. secrets, after all, are to be kept quiet.


End file.
